Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness: Stories

By Heather Fowler

Heather Fowler's fourth collection of short fiction speaks  to the language of need. Desperate, obsessive, and even demented need is voiced by characters ill or ill-advised. From modern to historical, cyber to stalker, explicit to tender, the relationships in Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness translate love and lust into intimat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hot Redhead Media
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734305203

Heather Fowler

Heather Fowler is a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a novelist. She is the author of the novel Beautiful Ape Girl Baby (2016) and the story collections Suspended Heart (2010, 2nd edition 2019), People with Holes (2012), This Time, While We're Awake (2013), and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (2014). Fowler's People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. Fowler has published stories and poems online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, and had work appear in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, and others. Hot Redhead Media publishes three of her audiobooks with one book also in trade paperback and e-book. www.heatherfowler.com

Book preview

THE HAND-LICKER

IT WAS THE MEMORY of the taste of Sharon’s lips that evoked a simmering wand of cinnamon, the quiet state of mind with which she read, licking her fingers every fifth turn—or, instead, the caustic break of how she’d left Evan without a word, simply disappearing from their apartment one morning.

Not that Evan had ever been able to accurately assess reality. There were the voices and, also, the distractions with which he found himself detoured from any sedentary activity by a fragmented passing of time, though these ample flaws didn’t, on a good day, as his mother had said many times, make him less beautiful.

Except I hate you, Mother, and we’re all fucking beautiful, he thought. If you believe Francis Bacon. Even at our ugliest, we’re beautiful.

He checked his clothing: Two green socks; a pair of black slacks; a t-shirt and a sweater; well-worn shoes, on the correct feet. He’d done well. Running through the checklist was meditative.

So noted, he said aloud, hearing the scattered whispers that an absence of meds could bring. It’s a bad day for positive symptoms; we must take extra precautions.

Even saying so to the echo of his apartment made things more bearable, not that he had much control over when these symptoms did appear, especially when he skipped doses. He’d skipped now for two days.

You can’t get into trouble again, Evan, his caseworker had cautioned the last time. Not again, okay?

I can’t help when I get in trouble, he replied.

Take your antipsychotics, she said. You don’t belong in jail. If you act out, you could go to jail.

I’ll stop embarrassing you because you like me, he replied without intent. The idea of obtaining her grudging acceptance or pleasure was enough, and if he said the right things, her soft face lit up with a hope he’d enjoy, but invariably destroy.

Remember, Sharon is gone, the woman said. Sharon is not coming back. Sharon does not exist near other women or on their person.

Burning cinnamon. Burning wand. Fire lips. Firebrand. Ensorcel. Enrage. I know, he said. I do know that.

But you still hear her.

Every day. Do you think I enjoy this? I can’t get her out of my head. She causes the problems.

The problems have other causes, too.

I didn’t say they don’t.

The last time, he’d been at a burger joint. Sharon had arrived in the food of an old woman. As the afternoon sunlight filtered over the woman’s wrinkled visage, Sharon spoke to him from her plate. Because Sharon asked questions but he wanted to stay below radar, he tried to uphold his part of the conversation from his seat across the room, but then her face materialized before him, zoomed up from the old woman’s hamburger and fries, and in his mind he saw the woman touching Sharon’s face, biting Sharon’s face, all the while Sharon’s mouth smiled, her raspy voice calling, Aren’t you going to come get me, Evan? See what she’s doing? I’ll be gone in a minute. Soon enough, I’ll be gone. You’ll have let me go again, you fucking loser.

He had approached eagerly, thinking with a trace of desperation of the last things Sharon had said to him the night before he’d discovered that she’d abandoned him, that rancid morning when he realized that even her knickknacks and plants had disappeared from the apartment, all her traces.

You never fucking sleep, she’d said. It unnerves me. This was what she’d uttered at midnight, years ago, when she’d surely decided she could no longer deal with the trials of his illness.

He’d replied, If I wake up and wake you again, I’m sorry. I can’t sleep well. If the meds were—

I don’t care about your meds. Let’s just hope I sleep, she repeated. And try not to disturb me with your terrors.

As if I have any control, he replied, but this was a pitiful and quiet rebuttal in the face of her apathy. And what a horrifying thing to say to someone before you plan to leave them, he thought, someone in permanent limbo, someone who suffers such terrors that they can barely keep track of their own dreams and waking. It’s not like he hadn’t offered her another room, hadn’t said many times that she was welcome to sleep separately, welcome to be just a friend who could stay in exchange for the simplest of help, so what a fucked-up, horrible thing to say to someone you professed to love—especially someone with attachment disorders, someone from whom, the very next day, you’d erase your entire existence.

To the social worker, later, he would explain that this was why, when he saw Sharon in that woman’s burger, among those greasy fries, he went and stood before her with aplomb, brought his face to the low level of the food, and said, I hope you don’t sleep this time, Sharon. I’m here now. There is no terror. I’m taking my meds. You can’t bother me anymore.

The seated woman regarded him with fear, a gentle old lady with gray curls, wearing a woolen sweater with a gold chorus bell pin. Leave me alone, strange man, she said, her voice atremble. Please back away.

What Evan had briefly seen of Sharon’s face disappeared. I’m Evan, he replied, extending his hand. I mean you no harm. No harm, no harm. He had learned this mantra from the Buddhists. Meditate to come down, he thought. Act normal. Be quiet and still.

No meds for two days, but I can handle it. So I lied to Sharon. So I’m not taking them. Sharon deserved my lies. No joy with the pills. I can live without their dull world. I can handle it, my life. The hallucinations don’t control me.

But he was mistaken. His eyes flew around the room and back to the woman before him. Reluctantly, she extended her aging claw. I should leave you now, he replied, fully intending to do so, but instead he grabbed her palm in his own hands, smelling Sharon, thinking Sharon, tasting Sharon, enveloped in the musk she wore and the scent that represented the back of her neck, lightly dried sweat and cut grass. Such an ugly thing in his grip, this woman’s wrinkled appendage, but he could not help himself. He licked her palm. It tasted of salt and soap. He kept licking, then tasted all of her fingers and the places between her fingers, tasted her knuckles, too, her veins and moles. He did not hear a thing when the woman began pleading for help, faintly, but he felt the thwack of her blue umbrella on his back and shoulders as she began to hit him, saw it like a black cane, like his father’s black cane.

In his mind, his father then beat him as he tasted Sharon. Low-class, lying, cheating whore, he could imagine his father would say. Wrong side of the tracks, Evan. You pay for women like that, then discard them. You don’t love them. And this, this from my son? The umbrella continued to fall.

Outside, the rain recommenced, splattering the restaurant windows. The old lady, her hand trapped in his, began to cry. Soon a bevy of workers would surround him, tearing him away, and he’d cry, too—where was he, who was he, what was he doing—innocent as a fool, blinded by his tears, by the absolute ugliness and implacability of it all, reluctantly awakening to the actual present as if out of a dark and smog-filled cave.

But he felt none of their hands pulling at him until after he surfaced from the dream in which, while his father’s cane kept falling, he tasted the backs of Sharon’s thighs, simultaneously undoing the garters she’d connected to her stockings, unhinging those stubborn rubber discs below her ass while she’d laughed, aware that he’d live happily forever if only for the daily sight of the bare thighs that led up to her perfectly round posterior, as once more the wreckage of time and its attendant truths deceived him, consumed as he was, as if for hours, in his memories of parting Sharon’s thighs from behind, tasting between them on that first night with her in his apartment, the night she’d said, You can have your way with me if you want, Evan; any way you want. I’m not scared.

I love you, he’d replied. But now, before he was removed from the old woman, he said it again, to the Sharon that existed on the woman’s hand. But why? Why did you leave me, Sharon? he asked. She did not answer, and, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, he said to the old lady, finally clearer once held back by four men and a woman, intermittently awoken from his fading phantasms by the sight of the old woman’s horrified face.

His apologies afterwards had not helped. It’s not about you, he told the lady as they wrenched him aside, preparing to deposit his slouching carcass in the rain. I was just looking for someone. But I am sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought I saw her. Outside, his tears and the hot summer rain comingled and, read his rights four minutes later by a plain-clothes deputy, he had another arrest on his record.

His caseworker would be furious. And how his father would be dismayed and ashamed, were he alive, like he was the day Evan lit the heritage tapestry on fire. You’ve got to make me proud, Evan, his father had said so many times. Look here. It’s our family tree. We can’t have a nutcase on it. No one can know about your problems. I can’t keep fixing you forever. His father fingered the tapestry as if it held the secrets to power or wealth.

The thing had hung in his father’s study, purchased custom from an artisan, adorning the back wall and spanning back to the 1600s. It had cost thousands. In the garden, it took three minutes to burn. That was a lie. It took two minutes and thirty-nine seconds to burn. Tired of hearing what he could not change, Evan had first seared his own name and then torched the whole, saying, Don’t worry! Now none of us has to hang from those trees!

Afterward, his father had beaten him senseless, left him on the den floor, and then turned on the baseball game. Baseball and punishment, baseball and bruising, seemed connected for him now. Sometimes, to the imaginary sound of his father in his mind, Evan smelled the sulfur on his own fingers and looked again for the old match while hearing a phantom game, thinking: If only I could light my tapestry head on fire. But all that was long ago. You stitched yourself into me. Three strikes. Tenth inning. Overtime. Now, there was the hand licking. The problems. Sharon coming. Sharon leaving. Additional accidents and incidents.

Soon after the one in the restaurant, he was told by his caseworker in her vaguely hopeless way, I like you, Evan the Fifth. I don’t want you to get thrown in jail or the loony bin again, okay? Repeat after me: Sharon is gone. Sharon is no longer here. Sharon is not coming back. Talk to your trustees. Be religious with your meds. Did you take your antipsychotics? Sharon is not on objects or on the hands of other people.

Evan smiled to thank her for her efforts and cried as he replied, I know you’re right.

But he remembered having seen Sharon in the Polish woman at the donut shop, in the fat mother in the bookstore, in the twenty- something woman-girl on the green bicycle. He’d licked their hands, too. The social worker had never known.

Charges had only been avoided because the women had felt sympathy, because he’d backed away quickly enough, some fateful intervention occurring, and his false imaginings and subsequent need to apologize made him seem so small, lost, and deluded that as he pursued Sharon’s vestiges, it was evident to most normals that he was more to be pitied than censured.

It was not that he hadn’t tried to lose interest in Sharon, gain interest in other women—but Sharon had accepted him, criminal as she was, low as she was, because she knew about his illness and didn’t care. And how could he expect decent people with no problems to deal with his madness if Sharon couldn’t? When they were together, he’d financed their lifestyle; she’d lasted four blissful months, the longest of any woman.

He tried to stop envisioning her every day, but if Sharon stopped appearing, he knew, it would be just like before, which was potentially worse—hallucinating his gone sister sometimes but mostly reliving embodiments of his father’s cruelty as he cowered and recollected the past in various public locations, once berated by the moving yellow pencil of a schoolgirl in the library, a pencil in the place of his old man. That day, when Evan had finally had enough of his father’s tirade, having decided to stick up for himself, he strode to the little girl in a gust of bravado, grabbed the father pencil by its scrawny little neck, and broke it in half before telling it firmly: You have no power anymore, old man! You should have never had power, you sad sack of pompous shit. I’m the family lunatic? You’re the lunatic! And the young girl had cried, yes, bawled while demanding in shrieks that he leave and that he replace her pencil, then calling for her Mama, so angry with her little blonde braids wagging, her magenta dress flaring before him. But no charges had been filed because what could Evan be persecuted for? Talking to someone invisible? Breaking a pencil? Making a little girl cry?

Sharon hated that episode when she heard about it, disdained his behavior as if he had demolished all happy-littlegirldom forever. You broke a girl’s pencil in the library, Ev? she asked. You scared a little girl? It was just a pencil. Your father was an asshole and your father is dead. He doesn’t live in pencils.

I needed you with me, Sharon.

I can’t be with you every day, she said.

No, too busy moving illicit goods into and out of the apartment, she wouldn’t pay much attention. Nonetheless, she made him take his meds after that, said, I can’t put up with this shit. You take them, or I’m moving out.

Evan followed her advice, did anything she mandated or supervised as long as she let him talk to her and touch her. Can we make love again? he asked so many times. Sometimes I feel like making love is the only thing I can do where it feels real and good at the same time. I’m good to you that way, aren’t I? Aren’t I the best you’ve ever had?

You know you are. Crazy as hell, but erotically talented, lover.

It’s my only skill, he said, touching her shoulder and letting his fingers trace a slow pattern over her back, caressing her in the way she enjoyed. If his mentality was a jumbled heap, his fingers had always moved majestically across women’s bodies, or so he’d been told; he could write a symphony from the moans and sighs he elicited. His recall was perfection. What a strange skill for a crazy man, he often thought, about which Sharon had agreed, but he had enormous talent.

He liked sex, too, pleasing people. I’m elegant when I’m naked, he sometimes thought, as he left the body of a sated, sleeping woman—elegantly naked in my sexy mental illness.

When Sharon left and he had no steady girlfriends, or between attempts to gain them, he’d often pursued temporary women to show them his gifts and seduce them to bolster his confidence. Sometimes ugly girls. Sometimes fat girls. Sometimes any girl. But he gave them all incorrect telephone numbers or names. Often, he pretended to be on vacation or from a foreign country—Ukraine, Belgium, Russia—just to enjoy the moments at their houses without having to explain or continue. When he wanted something real with someone, he knew, he’d have to admit his illness, and he didn’t want to explain it, knowing that they’d run, or that they would not understand, fearing that they’d feel cheated after he’d pleased them in bed. A loss. A pity.

The illness should be expressed before intimacy despite that to speak of it would often thwart that very access. The illness was a trust-killer, but it didn’t go away, shaming them afterward as well as it shamed him, for how could they have been lured by such a disaster of a man, one who could touch them very well, but who couldn’t tell a pencil from an abusive prick of a father, one who saw his sister in falling icicles and cried for hours after witnessing his mother in a shoe—a man who gained an obsessive desire to please women after his mother, subsequent to his father’s less violent abuses, had touched him wrongly in the bathtub to persuade him he was straight? See, Evan? See? A woman’s touch is what does this to you.

The lovers could not handle his truth. And when his inferiority shamed him or them, the illness relentlessly confirming his disability and causing more devastation in a rollicking cycle of horror, lack of empathy, and futility, he wanted to find the nearest bridge and throw himself off, to end this sequence of confessions and withdrawals, passionate involvements and tears.

He wanted to be honest.

He was honest with his caseworker at least; once he’d even tried to seduce her, thinking, she knows everything, it’s okay, though she was at least fifty-five, fat, sweet, single, and unavailable to clients in a romantic capacity. You and me, you and me, Frances—we should get together.

Are you flirting with me, young man? she’d asked.

I could take you to bed and take care of you and you could take care of me, he replied, examining her inch by inch, determining he could give up attractiveness for warmth. I’ll please you in bed, Frances. I’ll cook for you. Let me show you. I’m very good. You don’t have anyone to take care of you. I can take care of you and you can take care of me.

He thought that perhaps her supervision would keep him in line and he could get over, in stages, their age difference and her unappealing body. With as many women as he’d pleased, he picked a woman’s pussy better than a thief did a lock. It was no mystery. Anything unpleasant around the magenta core could be ignored—body, face, sound—so he might master her genitals, make her body quiver. We could make a go of it, he said. We’d never hurt each other.

Oh, honey, no, she replied, absorbing his contemplative look. I don’t need another manchild to tend. But you made me feel real sassy today. Thank you.

Rejected, he thought, by a woman twice my age. He’d never missed Sharon more. Regardless if Sharon had stolen, if she’d done drugs or sold them from his apartment, if she was unreliable, Sharon had at least told him everyone would love him. With her short black hair, Sharon was a plump pixie, appealingly thick in the thighs and hips. She told the most amazing stories.

She lied, yes,